CASE STUDY 1

Client A presents to therapy with several goals, one of which is improved, positive assertiveness in her work setting. The client reports a high degree of stress about an abusive boss. Even after many years in his employ, she continually struggles with feeling heard by him, and she knows that the power dynamic he casts is reminiscent of how she related to a previous spouse with alcohol use disorder. Although she identifies that these older wound issues will need to be addressed and healed later in therapy, her therapist begins, during stabilization, to help her develop some skills to better cope in her work setting. The therapist asks Client A if she is sitting or standing during these difficult conversations with her boss. She replies that he always summons her into his office and that the available chair is lower than the boss's own. When the therapist asks her to visualize herself in this scenario and recall how it makes her feel, she reports that she feels small in his presence, and because of that, she has a natural tendency to curl or cower inward. Inspired by work with trauma-informed chair yoga, the therapist/client dyad spends some time in the session working on how to sit with confidence: sitting forward in the chair so that her feet can remain firmly planted and grounded on the floor, spine upright and straight, shoulders relaxed away from her ears. In the first part of the exercise, Client A simply practices this posture, specifically practicing coming into it from her natural position, which is to sit back in the big chair and cower inward while her shoulders are spiking up toward her ears. After the client feels confident with the posture, she then visualizes sitting in this more confident posture while in her boss's presence. As a homework assignment, the therapist advises her to practice coming into this seated posture every day, pairing it with some of the breath exercises, other safeguard visualizations, and other positive affirmations she is learning in her therapy/healing. When it comes time to actually speak to her boss again, Client A is able to use this simple shift in her posture, which she reports allows her to speak more confidently and feel less affected by the boss's natural critical countenance.